WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-UpWelcome to the thirty-seventh edition of the WoW Economy Weekly Wrap-up! In this edition we're looking at the launch of the Battle for Azeroth Beta, discussing the price of WoW Tokens, heading to the Darkmoon Faire and sharing some tips to improve your Auction House sales. There's also the monthly giveaway!

My name is Gumdrops and I’m the lead moderator for the /r/woweconomy subreddit and the accompanying Discord server. I am also the Support Manager & User Evangelist for TradeSkillMaster, the Auction House addon suite for World of Warcraft. I hope to cover and showcase some of the interesting topics, discussions, content and guides that have been going on over the last week in the gold making community. Some that you might have missed as a veteran gold maker, or you might be interested in checking out for the first time as a new or aspiring ‘goblin’.

The format will not be that of a traditional guide, but links to further reading with commentary and opinions of my own. I will be looking at the bigger picture, the decision making and thought processes in being a gold maker – rather than a step by step instructional list. As the saying goes, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.

This week the Battle for Azeroth Alpha was transitioned in to the Beta, another wave of invites were distributed and luckily I was a recipient of one of those invites! I've been tinkering around on the beta briefly, but there have been no further updates to professions and quest-lines to obtain the recipes outside of the vendors have not yet been implemented. If you were already in the Alpha then everything was wiped clean to start fresh, and character copy has not yet been implemented:

Blizzard

With maintenance on the test realms, we're bringing up the BFA Beta test today. For those of you who tested the Alpha with us, you can expect a clean slate with regard to characters.

For those of you just joining us, thank you for testing! Please have a look at our various subforums for Beta discussion:

Again, nothing super specific to gold-making or the economic side of the game - however there were some interesting tidbits of information if you were listening for them.

Some players noticed that the Ashran achievements were moved to Legacy/Feat. of Strength categories in recent Alpha builds - Ion confirmed that Ashran is being temporarily retired but they have plans to bring the instanced PvP zone back in the future under the 'Epic Battleground' umbrella. This category of PvP zones would also include Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest. What this means for goblins and gold-makers is that the items that drop from Ashran to form part of the Garrison Auction House will temporarily be unobtainable. Specifically this affects the Module de langage universel which is created from three items dropped from Ashran: Egaliseur de langage universel, Filtre de langage universel and Registre de langage universel. The price of these items are undoubtedly going to increase, until they are returned to the game - and since there are plans to bring Ashran back in the future I wouldn't personally bet on these items being introduced in other places to be acquired while Ashran is temporarily inaccessible.

The reason it's important to have an Auction House in your Garrison is to avoid all the Cross-Realm Zone and phasing issues while working with the Auction House. Your Garrison does not have any phasing issues, so if you regularly get phased while running shopping, posting or sniper scans in major cities then the Garrison Auction House can be a total life-saver.

Secondly, there is going to be a reintroduction of Conquest Points for PvP gear progression:

How will gearing in PvP work in BFA? Random or vendors?There will still be a random reward structure in PvP. Through each season there will be a conquest progression to get your gear -- back in the day you needed a certain number of conquest points before you could buy the gear. In BFA, for example at the end of week 1, you get a helm, week 2, you can shoulders, culminating in the weapon. It's possible to get it earlier, through random rewards.

There will be a weekly conquest cap that increase each week. Catching up there's no cap, with a little acceleration so you if you come back Week 1, you can catch up to everyone else with enough Conquest Points.

If you were gold-making in Warlords of Draenor and earlier, these weekly caps and process of gear acquisition guaranteed PvP players rushing to the Auction House every week to buff their newly acquired gear. This consistent schedule allows for easy market resets and moving of large volumes of enchants outside of the usual raider markets.

As I mentioned, since I do have access to the beta I will be able to test and investigate things I cover in the blogs - so if there is anything you'd like to see discussed I'd love to hear your feedback or comments! I plan on obtaining as much data as possible regarding milling, prospecting and scrapping when it is possible to test, maybe even with community drive data sharing as goblins do like to share data.

Discussion PointDid you get an invite to the Beta yet? Do you already have your Garrison Auction House? How do you deal with phasing issues in capital cities?

This week saw a upward trend for the European WoW Token price and it got a lot of goblins discussing the differences between the EU and NA Token price - as the NA Token did not follow the same trend.

Checking the data from WoWToken.info, you can see the spike up to ~400k as the Battle for Azeroth pre-purchase was announced and made available back in January - and ever since the price has generally trended upwards culminating in new 'non-spike' highs of ~390k for EU Tokens before settling back down below that over the last few days.

Comparing that to the NA Token price, it has generally flat-lined since the expansion pre-purchase announcement and hasn't followed the same trend as EU, and never sitting above ~200k for very long.

There could be a feedback loop going on to create the spike. There are upward pressures on the price of tokens.

Gold is easy to get and many people will have accumulated significant gold and sellable assets. My wife had 950k in her bank just from levelling, world quests and playing her four characters. She's not a raider or mythic dungeoner and she doesn't spend gold. The mission tables are ridiculous. 40k per character per week pretty passively.

Fewer buyers, less demand and no sizable gold sinks.

I'm afraid I'm going to cast a certain amount of blame on the excellent posts by Gumdrops on Wowhead as well as the fantasic support from the vloggers and gold making community. It does make gold making accessible and an attractive proposition. So a lot of new people seeing gold making for tokens as something to do in the slow time between end of expac and pre-patch, other times they may have not played or ran legacy for achieves etc.

The recent spike does surprise me though, I though that there would be a constant, relatively smooth inflation curve. I wonder it the recent big jumps to the end of last week has made the those buying tokens with gold jittery, so people are cashing in their gold now rather than face a potential price of 400k tomorrow or the next day.

Yesterday the token went up to 364k then back to 351k, today they peaked at 380k and are back down to 360k. There is a heck of a lot of volatility in the market. Not sure whether that can be translated into advice on when to buy, my bet is still to buy sooner rather than later

I can probably shoulder some of the 'blame', among the wider gold-making community of content creators for helping people get involved in the economic side of the game - since it is comparatively easy to participate compared to previous expansions.

Less people playing, it happened before legion too. I think we'll hit 450k soon, and 300k soon after BfA's launch. Then 450k again a few months later. And hopefully it will stabilize. But I don't have much hope. Wealthy players are very wealthy so they'll keep buying.

The last part is interesting, as it reflects real world economies too - the rich generally stay rich or get richer. And while I'm not an economist myself, it's good to consider the real world implications both geographically and politically affecting the price of Tokens. /u/Lonewanderer08 explains:

Less people buying with real money makes the price rise, lots of people buying with gold makes the price rise.

In EU few people buy tokens with money, but almost everyone buys them with gold, that's different for US where there are almost "millions" more players so there are overal more people that are willing to buy with money instead of gold. The problem is in the EU realmpool we have strong countries like France, Iceland, Norway, Germany etc. where money isn't really scarce, but then we have Greece, Bulgaria, Poland and other eastern countries where money is tight and people cant/wont pay for tokens with real money.

This discussion of why EU prices suck so much come up every few months, the best thing Blizz could do would be to separate EU token prices in multiple blocks of commercially similar 'strong' countries so the token price actually fits the income, but this will never happen and therefore everyone gets f***** :(

I'm genuinely surprised that people on the NA servers seem to always be talking about how "high" the prices are getting and a lot of people stopping gold making because it "isn't worth it".

I've helped quite a few people here on this subreddit, browsing TUJ for their realm for some basic things they could work on to make gold with. Just simple shuffles, profession crafts and whatnot for active items that make a good profit over time, such as cloth/leather shuffles, Tome of the Tranquil Mind, potions, daily alch cooldowns and what not. And from what I've seen, it's pretty consistent that profit margins are better for the NA realms as well.

I've seen, and have been told a few times that EU tokens are higher because it's "easier to make gold there" and because it's easier, more people buy tokens leading in to higher token prices. But that's just simply not true, it's pretty much the opposite. People in EU have much less expendable money to buy tokens with, meaning there's less of a supply so the price is higher. I've thought about buying myself an NA account and set myself up with a couple of NA realms and start making gold there, because I genuinely feel like prices are on the average just better for goblining.

In any case, to actually answer your question ..

I'd imagine that in the current economy my cap would be around ~600k for a token. I can make that in a month and have extra to spare. With the expansion and it's inevitable inflation I'm inclined to believe I would be fine with 1m/token. Why would I pay such an insane amount of gold when I could spend 13€ instead, you ask? Well the answer is quite simple. 1m gold is realistically speaking nothing for me. I'm not looking to swim in gold, I'm not looking to buy spectral tigers and whatnot. I just want to play. I enjoy making gold but I don't really have anything I'd spend it on.

But that 13€ though, that's a lot of money for me. Right now 13€ is a bit over 10% of what I have left in a month after the necessary bills. Add in "luxuries" like internet, some better food, gaming in general and spending time doing something else but playing games, 13€ ends up being not too far away from a week's worth of food for me.

There are a lot of things to consider on the subject, and perhaps the scope of the discussion is simply beyond that of a Wowhead.com blog on making gold in World of Warcraft. With that said, I do hope Blizzard have the integrity of the in-game economy in mind for the health and future of the game long-term. Especially when there are real world currencies being traded, it makes a huge difference when considering changes even at the smallest level.

Battle.net Balance GiftingBlizzard recently announced the gifting of Battle.net/Blizzard balance:

Blizzard

Struggling to find the perfect gift for a friend, or just hoping to give them the flexibility to choose their own gifts?We’re expanding our gifting service by allowing you to send Blizzard Balance to your friends, offering you the benefits of retail gift cards in a new and easy-to-use digital format.Sending Balance gifts is simple: visit the Blizzard Shop, select one of the suggested values—or enter a custom amount, click the “Gift Balance” button, and select a friend.Blizzard will deliver your gift along with a notification and personalized message directly to your friend, who can then claim the digital gift card balance onto their account.As with other gifts, you’ll receive an email and a notification in the Blizzard App when a friend sends you Blizzard Balance, informing you that the gift has arrived and is ready to be claimed.Giving the gift of Blizzard Balance is a fast and easy way to ensure that your friends and family will get the Blizzard product that they want most.Happy Gifting!

While this recent announcement may not have a direct or implicit impact on the price of the WoW Token, as you can't use your own Blizzard/Battle.net Balance to gift to someone else, it's worth noting either way. When you go to make a payment for a gifted amount of Battle.net Balance you will be prompted to enter a payment method such as PayPal or VISA, instead of making use of your currently owned Battle.net Balance.

Discussion PointWhat kind of maximum price would you pay for a Token with gold? Do you prefer to pay for your game time with a paid subscription even if class yourself as a gold-maker? Do you buy Tokens to give yourself some gold in-game, if not how much gold would you need to get before you did so?

I recently quit my raid team a few weeks ago and I am a full time goblin now. I am an average goblin with around 7m going for my first gold cap. Every month its nice to get out of Orgrimmar and go to my favorite farming spot.

Step one: Turn on Netflix (this is the most important step)Step two: Grab your fishing pole and start fishing by the Lapin de Sombrelune.Step three: Open group finder and search for rabbit groups to get Lapin de Sombrelune.Step four: If a rabbit spawns on your realm create a rabbit group to give back to those who formed a group for you.Step five: If Croc-de-Lune spawns go kill it real quick for a chance at Loulou a sellable pet. (it will say the wolf has spawned across your screen so you cant miss it)

Every Crocs-lames de Sombrelune you get fishing is about 50g and more if you can shuffle them into Festin de poisson en croûte de sucre and sell them at the right time (these fish are only farmable one week out of the month so very limited supply). These feasts are amazing for mythic+ because it only takes 1 second to get your food buff. Also with stat inflation the 1% versatility is becoming the go to for a lot of classes for normal raiders. For anyone wondering yes you can level 1-800 here. I did it and around 550 fishing I started seeing consistent drops.

Moon moon and the darkmoon rabbit sell for around 30-60k depending on your server. Extremely relaxing and easy farm for goblins that like to put in minimal effort. Just trying to add my 2 cents for this subreddit that has been absolutely amazing to me!

Another aspect of gold making with the Darkmoon Faire includes the Replica Dungeon Set pieces from Vanilla which unlock those transmog appearances for items that are no longer obtainable. You can acquire a maximum of 281 Bon(s) pour un prix de Sombrelune per month (outside of the Sacoche de bons de la foire de Sombrelune that can be purchased from the Black Market Auction House) and they can be traded in to Baruma for the Replica pieces.

All of these methods are accessible to any level character, as long as you can enter the Darkmoon Faire - so they are great strategies to employ while leveling up or as a starting point for gold-makers with little capital to invest.

One thing to keep in mind, the Darkmoon Faire is currently not scheduled to arrive in the opening months of the Battle for Azeroth expansion - this may be similar to the delayed return of the event during the launch of Legion, so plan accordingly!

Discussion PointHow often do you participate in the Darkmoon Faire? Have you ever used the event to make gold? What's your favourite Darkmoon Faire game?

Breg has produced another excellent video covering various methods of increasing your Auction House sales - most of it is stuff we have covered here on the blog before and what I try and teach on my stream. But it's good to have another resource to reference with some stellar advice and tips to make the most of your time at the Auction House.

Key points to take away from this video:

Be efficient with your reposting/cancel scans. Don't spend all of your time reposting, you'll hit diminishing returns for time spent vs sales made.

You don't always have to be the cheapest auction. 'Pretty/neat stacking' allows you to charge more for different stack sizes, people pay a convenience fee.

Winners will have up to 14 days to reply to the email received to claim their prize or it will be forfeited. We're not responsible for any email issues you may encounter. A winner list will be posted here . If you're a winner and don't receive the email, please email , within 14 days of the giveaway end date. A valid entry is defined as a submission containing thoughtful and logical answers to posed questions (e.g. "it's cool", "ihgty", etc. isn't valid).

Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord server. You can also catch me streaming live on Twitch every Tuesday and Saturday from 5PM UK (12 Noon US Eastern) and Thursdays from 12 Noon UK (7AM US Eastern) or Fridays from 9PM UK (4PM US Eastern) answering gold making and TradeSkillMaster questions, or you can tweet your feedback/thoughts via Twitter at @GumdropsEU

Commentaires

Commentaire de DiEx93

on 2018-05-01T12:17:27-05:00

The neat stacking really helps alot when you are trying to sell items like crafting material or consumables. Also posting them just before the raid night prime time speed up the selling. Regarding the tokens I was never really interested in buying them as I prefer to keep the gold to buy raid BoE or anything that can boost me in a raid enviroment. Anyway, good summary with a lot of usefull tips for someone new to the AH enviroment.

Commentaire de Rogz

on 2018-05-01T12:37:42-05:00

Interesting read on the WoW Token pricing. Didn’t know the EU prices were so much higher than NA. I remember when they were going for $30K.

Commentaire de Vlalkor

on 2018-05-01T13:18:30-05:00

What kind of maximum price would you pay for a Token with gold? Do you prefer to pay for your game time with a paid subscription even if class yourself as a gold-maker? Do you buy Tokens to give yourself some gold in-game, if not how much gold would you need to get before you did so?

I usually don't like to spend more than 180 for a token, and even that is on my high end. I prefer to spend around 135-150 per token. I prefer to spend gold for my sub unless I drop under 1 million gold, then I spend the 15$. I mainly use the tokens to up my BNET balance to pay for subs and to buy new games/xpacs with the Bnet balance. If I was to buy a token for cash for gold, I usually wait until it goes to 230k or above.

I am very new to the TSM gold making scene and Gumdrops has been invaluable in helping me get started. For BFA I am planning to re-write my entire TSM code ( or steal someones). I look forward to hearing more about professions in the new xpac and gold making opportunities.

Commentaire de NemesisQ

on 2018-05-01T13:23:41-05:00

I usually repost my auctions once per day. I try to do it each day at a different time, as I'm trying to figure out when are the best hours to post stuff. A bit of a slow process, but I'm getting there.As I started my path as goblin only recently I'm working only on cooking and engineering. I'm acquiring new recipes and trying out the various crafts to see what works and what to ignore. I'm getting quite comfortable with them now, so I'll be adding a new profession into the equation soon enough. As for BfA, I'm finishing to set up my tailor, I'll focus on her at the beginning of the expansion, and see how it will work.

Commentaire de hasseoliver

on 2018-05-01T13:49:42-05:00

Interesting read as always.Regarding the questions, I repost A LOT. I've been collecting pets for years and have been starting to sell my duplicate pets, which costs thousands of gold and barley anyone wants to buy I have to repost until it sells.Pets and flasks is what I feel good and comfortable in. I hope to expand with flipping items next xpack.

Commentaire de killerham

on 2018-05-01T13:54:05-05:00

One thing to keep in mind, the Darkmoon Faire is currently not scheduled to arrive in the opening months of the Battle for Azeroth expansion - this may be similar to the delayed return of the event during the launch of Legion, so plan accordingly!

I didn't know about this! Looks like I need to hurry on over and make some quick gold on my alts before it's too late! For those of you that don't know, the Planque secrète de Silas quest can be done once per character and yields 100 tickets! All you need is a bunch of the Crocs-lames de Sombrelune fish that you can fish in the Darkmoon Faire waters! Really big gold making potential with the pets and replica sets since it looks like Darkmoon Faire won't be available on BfA launch so there will be less supply and (possibly) more demand! Good luck to all you gold makers out there!

Commentaire de Eridey

on 2018-05-01T15:54:36-05:00

I never really participate in the darkmoon Faire, only went there once to get to know it, because of this i never used the event to make gold. My favorite game though, I at lesst play them all the only time I went there, is the flying fire rings haha I got a cool toy from it.

Commentaire de Grabbo

on 2018-05-01T16:29:07-05:00

It seams to me that it will be harder and harder for rookies to make more gold in BFA. Won't the recipes be more easy to farm with the changes done in the jobs of BFA?

Commentaire de WoWBaby2000

on 2018-05-01T19:11:49-05:00

I participate in the Darkmoon Faire every chance I get, and have used the event to make gold a couple of times.

It always amazes me how much gold I can make from selling the Darkmoon Daggermaw. It's not a life changing amount of gold or anything but it is nice. AND I'm one of those really weird people who actually like to fish in WoW.

So I spend a few relaxing hours fishing at the Faire and listening to my favorite WoW YouTube Videos or audiobooks and sell the fish for gold.

Honestly my favorite game at the Faire has always been the Ring Toss with the Turtle. Why? Because I LOVE turtles, and the ring toss is my favorite IRL faire/carnival game.

Commentaire de Attenborough

on 2018-05-01T23:09:59-05:00

Fishing at the Darkmoon Faire seems like a really smart way to make money (and to get those non-combat pets for myself once I've made enough). I'm going to do that to level my BfA's character's fishing!

Commentaire de Koltiras

on 2018-05-01T23:21:48-05:00

I actually had no ideia Darkmoon Faire could be a proffitable timekiller, guess I'll be trying those steps when I got the chance.

Usually I only repost my auctions when their time expires (which is why I put them on 24h timing) and it's definitly a tool for my most comfortable market: professions such like inscription and enchanthing. My next step is to have an alchemy toon (as I saw it being the most proffitable profession on the start of the expasion)

Commentaire de stoupa30

on 2018-05-02T02:34:09-05:00

The darkmoon farming seems like good profit. The AH starts to be boring for me so I need new tips.

Commentaire de TheRealHechi

on 2018-05-02T06:35:21-05:00

1) "How often do you repost your auctions?"I post auctions 3 times a day. Once in the morning before going to work, once when I get home and once right before / during prime time (sometimes I post raid consumables twice, when most of my first listings sold quickly). I also run 2 TSM-Cancel scans (before work and when I get home) a day for pets and one (when I get home) for Transmogs and crafts.

2) "How many markets do you feel comfortable in"?The Transmog market. Made a few mistakes at the beginning, but now I got it going. Battle Pets were also a good choice. I try to also get in the Recipe market, however I haven't gotten pretty far until now.For fast gold the best is raid consumables and Jewelcrafting on my server. Even this late in the expansion, but I don't know for how long this keeps going on though.

3) "What are you going to do next to expand your gold-making?"Just got all crafting professions to >600 for BfA launch. Now I will grab some recipes to get going and maybe get some of them to 800.

Commentaire de Brandling

on 2018-05-02T07:13:04-05:00

At this point, it's hard to justify buying tokens on EU. Unless you don't care about cosmetics at all, the price feels way higher than it should be.

Commentaire de MrMarv

on 2018-05-02T08:21:21-05:00

The Darmoon Faire is something that we participated in whenever we had a chance just to get the carousel XP buff. I think that I will be trying the Firebird challenge to get the toy for the wings.

Commentaire de DRALSR

on 2018-05-02T09:38:29-05:00

for me is maximum price of wow token cca 15x the amount of your gold status after hiting max level, which is currently about 20 K, so as soon as will wow token hit 400K I think that people will stop buying it until it falls...

I like more to buy the game token for GT/ balance, cause my money can go into other things, but since my realm AH is more and more @#$%ed up, it's really hard get gold from there, cause gems are there for 100g or flasks like for 300g, so I have to find other ways of income, usualy and most efficient was M+ boosting, but now at the end of expac, almost everyone got his 10 alts on ilvl 965+ so it's more less pointless. I would never buy a token for gold... it's so unefficient and until the BfA on live gold are actualy without any value...

Commentaire de Rosheen

on 2018-05-02T11:11:32-05:00

the maximum price i would buy a WoW-Token for would be the maximum profit i can make a Month because spending gold is better for me than spending real life money. I would like to see Blizzard taking actions against the inflation but seeing as they make alot of profit with ppl buying gold via the WoW-Token my hopes for that are small.

Commentaire de Arxroth

on 2018-05-02T11:11:34-05:00

Shame to see that Universal Language module becomes unobtainable, which most likely will shoot prices in AH through the roof when people realize this... question though is that is there much need for garrison personal AH, maybe some will find.

Commentaire de Amaumau

on 2018-05-02T11:25:15-05:00

How often do you repost your auctions? How many markets do you feel comfortable in? What are you going to do next to expand your gold-making?

I repost my auctions twice a day and i am only on the jc market; i think i will try to take more professions with an alt.

Commentaire de rebrauzer

on 2018-05-02T12:07:40-05:00

I'm happy that Blizzard is offering the Battle.net Balance Gifting option. I'd really like to see a gifting option for BFA in the US. I'm surprised EU has a World of Warcraft: Battle of Azeroth Pre-Purchase (PC - Code in a Box) to be able to gift, however this does not seem to be available in the US. I've seen this special Pre-Purchase box version even on Amazon UK, however I have not found it on Amazon US. Has anyone heard any details if this special box version may be available soon in the US?